dichotomy of a heart
by sea-salt kisses
Summary: All through an empty place I go, and find you not in any room. — Axel, Roxas, Xion


**dichotomy of a heart.  
><strong>_some say the world will end in fire;  
><em>_some say in ice.  
><em>**. . .**

Roxas won't remember it after the fact, but when the girl from his past fades, body chipping and spreading fast to the summer winds, she turns to ice. Cold, brittle, unyielding. He grips her flesh and it scathes his fingers, benumbing them and turning them blue. Not the gentle, concentrated blue of their eyes; soft, earnest, and disarming. Not like the sprawling blue of the Neverland sky, framed with light and the gentle braying of clouds. No; a blue like the gaping maw of an abyss; depthless, hopeless, empty.

He struggles to remember who she is, or what relevance she holds to him; he registers somehow only the irony of it all. The girl in his arms, she is like ice – pernicious in her power and dangerously fragile.

Roxas wonders at the beauty of her; soft frost-tinged lips and porcelain white skin. He knows he should _know_ something about her, remember the way the black strands of her hair used to feel in his hands, but all he can process is the feeling of ice, glacial and spiking against his palms.

He remembers only when it is too late, and he feels himself begin to break.

All the members of the Organization played a part in their own dissolution. She was the domino. The crucial piece of the puzzle that, if removed, would affect all the others. With one shove, all the plans so carefully and deliberately laid out would fall to ruin. _Xion. _The name and the memories associated with it are ephemeral, fleeing gradually, wordlessly away. A ghost-smile on lips wrapped around a sea-salt popsicle. Cold fingers tracing the line of his jaw, trailing goosebumps across his cheek. The flittering softness of a laugh, like wind-chimes. His eyes water at the pressure building in his throat. He wants to scream, he wants to curl in on himself, to hold her body tight and refuse to let it dissolve into shards of darkness. He chants her name like he's gripping a rosary, trying to keep it in the forefront of his mind. This, he knows, is of the utmost importance.

Her body fractures into nothing, and when the tremors fade, Roxas finds a solitary seashell, glazed in frost and dyed a cyanotic pink. He tucks it away within his coat, summoning a dark portal and disappearing within its algid depths until he remembers nothing more.

* * *

><p>The man with hair of the most vivid red is a different story entirely.<p>

Roxas doesn't remember him either, but this time, he doesn't want to.

He's brash and loud and boisterous, with a horrible smile like serrated metal and teeth sharp and white against the pallet of his throat. This man is dangerous, a monster, body dictated by fractal angles and the arch of his hips, arms overlong and legs composed of hard, coiling muscles. No matter where he runs, Roxas can't escape him. The man in black haunts his dreams, making him doubt the sanctity of his own reality.

One moment he's fighting, Struggle bat spinning the moments away, and the next, everything grows stagnant and even the daylight dims – all that moves is Roxas and the man in the black coat. Roxas thinks he's like a virus, infecting the programming of everything around him, a glitch that needs to be eradicated. He looks upon Roxas with something frightening in his absinthe eyes; something like desperation and agony and _longing_, and Roxas can only push away the wisps of something long forgotten clotting in his mind.

They fight. They fight and somehow, Roxas pulls from a reserve he never knew existed and wins. The man disappears into nothingness and Roxas still has no answers. He can only smile for his friends and pretend it is all a dream; a waking nightmare. He sees the man once more before the girl, the lily-flower princess with washed out hair and a frail, broken smile brings him to her palace in the woods. He stumbles through the wreckage, slashing at stray monsters that raise their ragged heads from beneath the floor. His recovery is half-hearted. He remembers one thing, and not another. He remembers the difference between a person and a Nobody, a chakram and a Keyblade, but not why these things burn so poignant in his mind.

He makes his way to the basement. One moment he's warily eyeing doorways, and the next he's pinned against a filthy wall, a large hand cupping the side of his face while the other latches at his neck. The man sets something aflame within him; a hatred, a conflagration of something buried deep beneath his memory. This man is not to be trusted. He is the destruction, the Judas kiss, the suffocation. The gloved fingers tighten around the column of Roxas's throat and those sharp teeth graze the curved shell of his ear.

"Why can't you understand?" the voice hisses, rasping and broken like his smile, and Roxas begins to fight back, limbs jolting to life and bruising any surface they can touch. The man doesn't laugh this time. He makes a sound between a sob and a snarl, shoving back from Roxas with nothing on his face anymore but a sort of torrid determination.

Roxas closes his eyes and tears through the roiling firestorm, lurching from side to side amidst a turgid inferno. The red man moves with the grace of a gazelle, eyes shining outward like coals through the swirling red, emerald embers. Roxas swallows the tang of ash in his mouth, watches the destruction with widening eyes and the sudden pain of realization. It's thrust through his body like a brand.

This, all this, his purpose, his mission; he remembers – Roxas cannot lose. He holds this knowledge tighter to his chest and lashes out with jab after swipe after swing of his Keyblades.

It isn't long after this that the fight ends and the uproar ceases to exist. He looks at the defeated man – _Axel_ – and remembers fire. He remembers the harsh timbre of a laugh and the vivacious gleam in eyes impossibly green. The feel of livid fingers gripping the front of his coat. A forceful, despairing press of thin, chapped lips against his own. Axel; the deception. The downfall. But Roxas watches those eyes bloom an unspoken goodbye. He watches, and barely swallows the mounting urge to call out Axel's name in desperation and fear. He remembers a silhouette fading fast in his arms, an earth-shattering loneliness, and all at once he longs to call the man back.

But Axel fades and Roxas is left a forsaken boy alone in a forsaken house with a forsaken witch-princess and a long forsaken figment of a man; _alonealonealone_.

Roxas swallows hard at the lump in his throat, stands straighter, and opens the final door.

**. . .  
><strong>_all through an empty place I go,  
><em>_and find you not in any room._


End file.
